Lia’s Reviews > Ovid's Heroides: A New Translation and Critical Essays > Status Update

Penelope was not suicidal, a passive victim or suitable for erotic representation … Rather she was a faithful wife and devoted mother of a grown man… it has been suggested that in a corrupt period, in which trickery was key to survival, artwork demonstrating skill at deception was valued, at least by Petrucci, the artist’s patron, who considered himself rather crafty

But Odysseus returned with a hydrofoil filled to the brim with treasures, courtesy of Poseidon’s lackeys (and a lovesick princess Nausicaa entrapped by Athena). Why would he need to “prostitute his own wife to a rich old man”?

Although two Greeks are speaking, incongruously the sphere of operations is Horace’s Rome, and it shows two heroic figures in a distinctly unheroic light, with the implication that even they would be infected by the rampant immorality there. So the wise and revered prophet offers immoral advice, and the great warrior is perfectly ready to put it into practice and demean himself.

Ovid here does something that he does over and over again in the Heroides: he takes material from a much loftier genre of poetry and converts it to elegy, putting the emphasis on love and giving the female real prominence... Rather than being just one character in the epic poem, she now gets a whole poem to herself, and it is her voice that we hear and her point of view that we see

His father wanted him to follow a conventional career in the world of law and politics, and Ovid did make a start at that, but he soon rebelled and rejected it for a life as a poet,

Boccaccio seemed to have plagiarized your self-fashioning too! Or rather, this reads like Boccaccio’s own path to becoming a writer/poet.

Hello Ovid my old friend,
I’ve come to read with you again.

(psst, I think Boccaccio plagiarized you.)